Geolocated Tweets Form Towering Pillars in New 3-D Maps

Nicolas Garcia Belmote created Andes to show geolocated tweets as topography. Here's San Francisco. Image: Twitter

If you look closely, you can see the path of BART running from San Francisco to Oakland. Image: Twitter

San Francisco with the "grid" overlay. Image: Twitter

The "clear" overlay allows you to get a better idea of neighborhoods and city borders. Image: Twitter

Manhattan's spikes tower over Brooklyn and New Jersey. Image: Twitter

Some of the maps can be a little more ... abstract. Image: Twitter

New York City with the "dark" overlay. Image: Twitter

You can view the terrain from different angles and planes. Image: Twitter

Istanbul with the "heat" overlay. Image: Twitter

Another view of Istanbul's geolocated tweets. Image: Twitter

There are countless ways to represent a place—neighborhoods, roads, waterlines, to name just a few. “But latitude and longitude are not the only dimensions that define a city,” says Nicolas Garcia Belmonte, a data visualization scientist at Twitter. “Whoever has biked in San Francisco, for example, can tell you the importance of knowing the topography of the city.”

Keeping the punishing hills of San Francisco in mind, Belmonte has created Andes, a three-dimensional, interactive look at where people in New York City, San Francisco and Istanbul have been tweeting from for the past four years. Belmonte used the same dataset that was developed for Geography of Tweets, an earlier project from Twitter’s Visual Insights team that visualized billions of geolocated tweets.

A view of Istanbul’s geolocated tweets rotated to the side. Image: Twitter

The elevations you see are defined by the number of tweets sent.

Though the Andes maps look similar to the topographical variety you’d find in your geography textbook, they’re totally different. The elevations you see are defined by the number of tweets sent from a particular location. So the higher the peak, the bigger the number of tweets. Each map’s elevation can be manipulated, and by dragging your mouse you can switch up the angle and get a more detailed view of how tweets comprise a city.

Belmonte created eight overlays to further define and contour the maps and to give visual cues about what you’re looking at. “This is more of a design piece than an analytical tool,” Belmonte says, but if you look closely, you can see the ferry paths in NYC, the underwater line that represents BART from San Francisco to Oakland and even the lack of tweets coming from Central Park. “I think that that’s what’s interesting about these types of projects,” he says. “They’re not made to find an answer to a particular question, but they still provide insights to questions we would have never thought about asking.”